The individual compartments of safe deposit box nests are typically closed at their forward ends by doors formed from steel plate. Usually, the doors are manufactured from blanks which are precut slightly oversize and then fitted individually to their respective compartments by hand grinding of their edges. After fitting, the doors are laid in their respective compartment openings and temporarily numbered, which numbers are thereafter permanently stamped into the door outer faces. Subsequently, the lock nose or horn holes are punched, and each door is then placed upon a jig which engages it through its nose holes and holds it in a horizontal position. At one station the lock attaching holes are drilled and tapped. The jig and door are manually transferred to a second station where the hinge mounting holes are drilled. Finally, the door number recesses are painted and the doors polished.
Obviously the foregoing entails a great deal of hand labor and thus cost. Besides that, the doors are not necessarily "square" or uniform in configuration because of the hand grinding of their edges, nor consequently are the nose holes uniformly located since the door edges are used as references when the nose holes are punched. Since the location of the hinge mounting holes are also determined by reference to the door edges, these also tend to be not quite uniformly located, whence the doors must be individually refitted by hand to their respective compartments. The chief object of the present invention is thus both to reduce the amount of hand labor necessary for the manufacture of safe deposit box nest doors and to make the doors as uniform in size and configuration as possible.